Digital activism groups in the fight against femicides and other gender-based violence against womenAbstract
This article analyzes the strategies of Brazilian digital activism collectives in combating femicides and other forms of gender-based violence. Based on a theoretical-methodological approach that combines Critical Discourse Analysis, the “politics of everyday life,” and connective action, the study examined the posts with the highest engagement from six collectives on Instagram. The results identify algorithmic engagement strategies, discursive forces of denunciation, support, information, and memory preservation, articulated through a visual aesthetic and plural bodily expressions. It is concluded that these collectives transform vulnerabilities into collective resistance and develop political action aimed at gender justice, although they face challenges such as the ephemerality of online attention and algorithmic mediation. The connection between these experiences and the field of health still needs to be developed for mutual benefit in their actions.
Key words:
Femicide; Gender violence; Digital activism
Resumo
Este artigo analisa as estratégias dos coletivos de ativismo digital brasileiros para o enfrentamento aos feminicídios e outras violências de gênero. Partindo de uma abordagem teórico-metodológica que articula Análise de Discurso Crítica, “política da vida cotidiana” e a ação conectiva, o estudo analisou as postagens com maior número de engajamentos de seis coletivos no Instagram. Os resultados identificam estratégias algorítmicas de engajamento, forças discursivas de denúncia, acolhimento, informação e preservação da memória, articuladas a uma estética visual e corporalidades plurais. Conclui-se que esses coletivos convertem vulnerabilidades em resistência coletiva e desenvolvem ação política voltada para justiça de gênero, embora enfrentem desafios como a efemeridade da atenção online e a mediação algorítmica. A articulação dessas experiências com o campo da saúde ainda precisa ser construída para benefício mútuo da atuação.
Palavras-chave:
Feminicídio; Violências de gênero; Ativismo digital
Resumen
Este artículo analiza las estrategias de grupos brasileños de activismo digital para confrontar los feminicidios y otras formas de violencia de género. Mediante un enfoque teórico-metodológico que articula el Análisis Crítico del Discurso, la “política de la vida cotidiana” y la acción conectiva, el estudio analizó las publicaciones con mayor interacción de seis grupos en Instagram. Los resultados identifican estrategias de interacción algorítmica, fuerzas discursivas de denuncia, apoyo, información y preservación de la memoria, articuladas con una estética visual y corporalidades plurales. Se concluye que estos colectivos transforman las vulnerabilidades en resistencia colectiva y desarrollan acciones políticas orientadas a la justicia de género, si bien enfrentan desafíos como la fugacidad de la atención en línea y la mediación algorítmica. Aún es necesario construir la articulación de estas experiencias con el ámbito de la salud para el beneficio mutuo de la acción.
Palabras clave:
Feminicidio; Violencia de género; Activismo digital
Introduction
Confronting gender-based violence constitutes one of the most urgent challenges of contemporary societies1. Under the Convention of Belém do Pará, gender-based violence against women may be defined as “any act or conduct, based on gender, that causes death or physical, sexual, or psychological harm or distress to women, whether in the public or the private sphere”2. Such violence is not expressed only in physical assaults, but also in symbolic, psychological, moral, and digital dimensions-all sustained by patriarchal structures and other inequalities visible in the everyday life of interpersonal and institutional relations1-3. In this context, denunciation and mobilization actions emerging in digital spaces are becoming increasingly relevant, especially because these environments have ceased to be mere communication channels and have become infrastructures of power, visibility, and disputes over meaning, forming a new public arena4,5.
Data on femicide, the most extreme expression of violence against women, illustrate its structural persistence. The 2023 Report on Femicides in Brazil recorded 1,706 completed cases and 988 attempts, equivalent to 4.7 violent deaths and 2.7 attempts per day-numbers that, even when underreported, reveal the lethality of gender-based violence6. The Brazilian Public Security Forum7 reported a 1.4% increase compared with the previous year, totaling 1,463 victims. Preliminary 2024 data indicate a further rise, with 1,492 deaths8. On a global scale, an estimated 85,000 women and girls were killed in 2023, 60% of them by intimate partners, former partners, or family members1. These numbers reveal not only the severity of the problem, but also the continuity of multiple forms of violence that are interconnected and mutually reinforcing.
Historically, confronting gender-based violence has occupied center-stage in feminist movements, especially from the 1970s onward, when the sphere of “private” violence came to be understood as a first-order political issue9,10. The issue gained priority in the Latin American and Caribbean context, materializing in 1994 in the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women, which established women’s right to live a life free from violence as a human right2.
However, in recent decades, feminist activism and advocacy for women’s rights have been reconfigured in the face of the platformization of social life. Part of street-based and institutional movements has migrated to digital arenas, marked by their own techno-social dynamics. These spaces host both groups historically linked to feminism and others with more diverse and fluid ideological profiles, yet committed to “confronting violence against women.” Nor can we define “digital activism” as a crystallized concept. We prefer the notion of DAP (digital activism practices) proposed by Von Bülow et al. 11, which highlights the dynamic, diverse, and impermanent actions that include languages other than the instrumental-rational argumentation recurrently used by traditional political stakeholders. These environments, however, are not neutral: they are shaped by algorithmic systems that filter, classify, and rank content, determining what gains or loses visibility12.
Digital activism operates above all through everyday experiences13 of “life politics,” as Giddens14 called it, built in the daily lives of its agents. Beck15 likewise speaks of subactivism, a form of action mobilized in micropolitical dynamics that broadens conceptions of civic and/or political participation. In this activism, mobilization for action also occurs through the sharing of personal stories and affective performances.
Following a similar line of thought, Bennett and Segerberg16 highlight two ideal types of political action that provide important support for the analysis of activism on digital social media. Collective action expresses the more established models, based on the actions of institutions and groups with shared ideals, which share a sense of belonging and memory and seek to engage people in a collective cause. Connective action, in turn, refers especially to strategies that mobilize constant performances, content, stories, and individual experiences that are shared on social media, linking people to a given political agenda. Self-testimonies are the raw material that mobilizes affective-political ties in these spheres of digital activism, continuously crossing the boundaries between the intimate and the public16-18. We consider that activist groups confronting gender-based violence operate in the transit between these two registers, constructing a distinctive and fluid repertoire in which algorithms actively participate in the social production of relevance and operate as invisible mediators between discourse and its apprehension by an audience12.
In this activism, such mediation assumes an ambiguous character, both enabling the expansion of support networks and the circulation of counter-hegemonic narratives and imposing subtle constraints derived from the market logic of platforms. Velkova and Kaun19 describe how feminist groups learn to act within and against recommendation systems, adjusting captions, posting rhythms, images, and hashtags to escape filters and broaden the reach of their messages-designating this movement as algorithmic resistance.
Activist groups face algorithmic instability, automated censorship, and online harassment, which function as mechanisms of symbolic containment and discipline of women’s voices. Platforms not only host public debate, but regulate it-and, in doing so, produce new forms of exclusion that unequally affect feminist experiences and expressions12,19-21.
The digital expression of contemporary feminisms, referred to as “fourth-wave feminism,” as well as other activist experiences aimed at confronting gender-based violence, do not merely occupy digital space but also undergo the impositions of the platforms that host them. Cyberfeminism ceases to be only a utopia of technological emancipation and comes to incorporate a structural critique of platform capitalism21. Networks, once seen as tools, take on the role of co-authors of the forms of engagement, visibility, and resistance.
Important gaps remain in the field of Brazilian studies despite the broad production on digital activism. Among the articles indexed in the SciELO database in January 2025, more general analyses predominated on online political participation, engagement dynamics on social networks, and studies of specific campaigns or highly visible events. Few studies articulate the empirical analysis of digital engagement practices in confronting violence against women, and little is known about the communication and mobilization strategies of groups oriented toward the specificities of this agenda. Based on the analysis of the work of some Brazilian groups linked to digital activism this article, therefore, proposes to discuss strategies for confronting gender-based violence, considering the affinities among discursive strategies, affects, corporalities, and algorithmic action.
Methods
The present study is based on the assumptions of Critical Discourse Analysis according to Fairclough22,23, coordinating them with critical digital methodologies24 and the proposal of methodological triangulation adapted for Denzin’s25 and Flick’s26 approaches to data collection. We start from the conception of discourse as social practice, in which language, power, and ideology are articulated in the production and circulation of meanings22,23.
Corpus construction and profile selection
We mapped digital feminist groups confronting violence against women by triangulating three search strategies. In March 2024, we conducted an exploratory search on Instagram using five keywords containing central lexicons of this activism: Portuguese terms of social mobilization and visibility campaign slogans (“respeita as minas”/“não é não”); the central legal-political marker of the debate (“feminicídio”); and direct denunciation expressions (“violência contra mulher não”/“machismo não”). The initial search resulted in 250 profiles. As a selection criterion, we considered the profile’s characterization as a civil society group with regular public activity and an explicit focus on political action against gender-based violence. Individual, state-institutional, and commercial-purpose profiles were excluded. After this refinement, we identified 16 relevant profiles, highlighting the need for more accurate search methods.
In April 2024, we used nine hashtags on the topic that showed a substantial number of posts: #ViolênciadeGênero (455,000), #violenciacontramulher (409,586), #Feminicidio (281,000), #MexeuComUmaMexeuComTodas (106,000), #MachismoMata (84,800), #nãoénão (58,023), #nenhumaamenos (48,747), #violencianao (34,841), and #AssédioNão (5,000+ posts), allowing the identification of 90 profiles. However, most were professionals or politicians using hashtags for self-promotion rather than activism. Only 12 groups were considered relevant.
Given the still limited number of profiles, we adopted “snowball sampling”27. A consultation form was sent to 39 specialists, who suggested 65 profiles.
These suggestions, together with the previous ones, were submitted to the following exclusion criteria: 1) not highlighting violence against women in the content; 2) inactive accounts for more than 6 months or profile not found; 3) not operating in Brazil; 4) profiles of government institutions. From May to June 2024, three independent researchers analyzed the entire sample, classifying each profile; they then performed a joint review to agree on their choices. As a result, 18 group profiles were selected, focusing on violence against women and girls or femicide as their main agenda.
In order to further expand the corpus, using a research profile created on Instagram, we followed those accounts and recorded the similar-profile recommendations provided by the algorithm. This so-called “silicon snowball”28 technique allowed us to identify 432 recommendations. Screening excluded 370 profiles by applying the exclusion criteria, preselecting 45 groups.
A new detailed content analysis of these profiles, conducted by three researchers, resulted in the final selection of 23 groups, which were added to the 18 from the previous phase. Considering the dense and extensive archives, we selected six groups with the largest number of followers and representing a diversity of profiles and action strategies.
Data collection procedures and tools
The collection and selection of posts were supported by the Dashboards tool of the Health Data Science Platform (PCDaS), developed in partnership with the Health Information Laboratory/ICICT and the National Scientific Computing Laboratory/Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation29. These interactive web-based dashboards for data mining and analysis allowed us to extract, organize, and visualize information from social networks, websites, and public databases.
Thus, we extracted information from public Instagram pages such as date and time of the post, textual content, profile and post address, mentions, hashtags, number of likes and comments, organizing such data in Excel format.
For each of the six groups under analysis, we selected the 20 most-commented posts over 18 months (January 2023 to June 2024), totaling 120 posts.
Analytical procedures
Based on Fairclough’s CDA22 and on the sociotechnical and connective dimensions of activism on digital social media16-18, the following analytical categories were selected, integrating textual discursive dimensions (themes and forces), semiotic discursive dimensions (images and visualities), and algorithmic dimensions (Chart 1).
The analysis was conducted in three interdependent moments22: 1) Descriptive phase: systematization of the corpus through identification and classification of textual, visual, and interactive elements; 2) Pre-interpretation: analytical reading in light of the selected categories (Table 1), relating discursive and engagement practices; 3) Interpretation: interpretive coordination among discursive productions, social practices, and the ideological contexts that sustain them.
Ethical aspects
The study followed the ethical guidelines of Resolution No. 510, as well as international guidelines for research in digital environments30, restricted to the use of publicly available content, respecting privacy and avoiding the direct identification of victims or family members in situations of vulnerability. A Research Ethics Committee approved the study under CAAE number 77703024.2.0000.5269.
Results and discussion
Brief characterization of the groups
Chart 2 indicates the profiles of the groups analyzed, whose missions range from legal guidance, psychosocial support and care, gender information and education, but share a perspective of defending women’s rights, the action of volunteer professionals as the basis of their work, the problematization of gender inequalities and violence, and digital social media as central to their communication strategies. They define themselves as “spaces” and “networks” that connect support, information, gender education, and political mobilization, converging with a sphere of digital activism from the perspective of confronting violence against women31. They move between an ethics of feminist care directed toward women victims of violence and an expanded view of care as the center of human life, as a right, and as a policy for promoting equity32. Some of the profiles are also marked by a gender justice orientation, with redistributive assumptions and recognition of the right to live a life free from violence33,34.
Only one of the groups explicitly declared itself anti-racist, anti-ableist, and anti-LGBT-phobic. In the discourses and self-definitions of the profiles, we observed a relatively universalist conception of the category “woman,” which tends to operate as an abstract political subject. However, this universalization is relativized by the mobilized narratives, the images used, and the highlighted cases, in which differences marked by race, social class, generation, corporality, and social position emerge.
Themes and forces
The theme common to all the profiles analyzed is gender-based violence in its multiple forms-psychological, physical, sexual, patrimonial, and moral-along with ways of overcoming or confronting it, legal mechanisms of reparation, and support for victims. Each group, however, invests in different niches of approach, defining the specificities of its own activist action.
@mapadoacolhimento emphasizes themes related to listening and the importance of support networks as central elements for overcoming violence. It understands support as active listening and an act of validating pain, without judgment or proof. The action of women to build a support network, understood as a mechanism for breaking the cycle of violence, is thematized in several messages.
In turn, the main themes of the @justiceiras and @IMP pages are mechanisms for reporting violence and channels of support. Unlike profiles focused on testimony or direct emotional sensitization, they invest in practical mobilization, disseminating laws, especially the Maria da Penha Law, and forms of access to justice. In line with the well-known diagnosis of women’s precarious access to justice35, these profiles provide tutorials on how to seek free legal assistance, file a police report, obtain protective measures, and what to do in cases of digital violence. The proposal is clear: to inform and guide so that justice may be done, both through proper accountability of perpetrators and through reparation of violated rights.
One of the main themes of the @maselenuncamebateu page is emotional violence in its different expressions. One especially recurrent topic is gaslighting-a term designating psychological manipulation in which the perpetrator distorts the victim’s reality, making her doubt her own memory, sanity, or perception of things36. Clarifying victim-blaming strategies is another central thematic axis. The group highlights how these behaviors affect mental health, but also points out that they may culminate in physical violence. Thus, there is a considerable number of posts on femicides and severe physical assaults.
The main theme of @levantefeminista is gender-based violence in its most extreme form-femicide-through an intersectional lens. Aligned with the decolonial perspective on gender-based violence3,37, the group @atamojuntas likewise highlights misogynistic and racist violence practiced by ordinary people, celebrities, or authorities. Both groups denounce murders of women in Brazil and treat them as the result of a systematic project of patriarchal control and subjugation of female bodies.
The persecution and violence suffered by the groups’ own activists were highlighted by @atamojuntas and @IMP, reaffirming the global incidence of persecution of activists who operate in spaces connecting the digital environment and the streets38.
Mental health problems constitute a theme present in most profiles, appearing as consequences of gender-based violence in its various manifestations (depression, suicide attempts, post-traumatic stress, eating disorders, insomnia, anxiety). Health services and the specialized care network for women victims of violence were identified only in @IMP posts, which critically emphasized the low availability of services. Contrary to the recognition the issue has in Collective Health, including as public policy39, such themes appear secondarily in the posts and do not constitute an “agenda.”
The discursive forces activated by the groups - that is, the illocutionary core of the actions proposed in the statements22 -form a diverse and convergent semantic network. Looking at the posts with the highest engagement, we highlight four axes in which the main discursive forces of the profiles converge: 1) “denounce,” “mobilize,” “demand”; 2) “receive/support,” “share”; 3) “inform,” “educate”; and, finally, 4) “remember / not forget” and “celebrate.” We may infer that these forces compose the main meanings of the activist grammar of the groups analyzed, and of digital activism itself, by linking emotional engagement to political mobilizationand the preservation of memory as a political act3, 16,17,40,41.
The force of mobilizing collective actions, campaigns, public acts, and urban interventions is a discursive hallmark of all the profiles. Posts announcing or documenting marches, protests, and debates invite followers into the streets and onto the networks, transforming mourning into public presence and resistance. Impactful phrases-such as “Don’t even think about killing me” or “Our mourning is struggle” (@levantefeminista)-reaffirm an enunciative repertoire of confrontation and non-submission, operating as slogans that articulate word, emotion, body, and territory16,17,42.
One of the main forces activated in the posts of @levantefeminista and @atamojuntas is that of public denunciation, especially of femicide cases and other forms of gender-based violence, followed by the trivialization or leniency of institutions and of society at large. These denunciations are accompanied by demands for reparative measures. In this context, the reports of murdered women are again portrayed not as isolated events, but as part of a structural system.
@mapadoacolhimento, @maselenuncamebateu, and @justiceiras stand out in the force of calling for solidarity-based action among women, inviting them also to become agents of support and to build together a support network that also extends to children. Support networks are likewise summoned in cases of threats against activists, as denounced by @IMP and @atamojuntas. The proposal is clear and converges with other experiences of digital action and feminist activism8,19,33 to transform care into politics, making the profile not merely a source of information, but a space for subjective reconstruction and collective action.
The most frequent discursive forces in the posts of @justiceiras and @IMP were those of informing (about all laws and rights of women victims of violence and the ways to access them; about statistics on cases of violence; about the signs of abusive relationships), as well as of building critical awareness regarding misogyny and gender-based violence (a cross-cutting force in most of the other profiles’ posts).
Remembering/not forgetting or honoring women who suffered gender-based violence or fought for its end are forces that have historically marked feminist struggle, articulated to the cultivation of memory42,44. The names and faces of murdered women and activists are remembered, their stories are told, demanding justice and visibility, reinforcing a sense of legacy and belonging to the feminist movement and to the group in particular.
Reinforcing the legacy of struggle of the groups and of the movement also gains prominence in celebrating legal achievements and in highlighting activists or groups in strategic positions, or their participation in high-profile and publicly relevant activities.
Algorithmic and discursive engagement strategies
The creation of hashtags was the most constant algorithmic engagement strategy used by the groups. Here, the hashtags containing the name of the group itself were the most frequently cited, even more than those of political mobilization, clearly evidencing the intention to increase the visibility of the profile itself (Chart 3). The use of hashtags is a discursive strategy recognized throughout the digital ecosystem, whether as an indexer of themes and debates, a promoter of engagement in specific communities, a catalyst of social mobilization, of collective identity-building44, and as a sociotechnical resource of feminist struggle capable of bringing together different generations45.
On Instagram, they are also used to broaden the reach of publications, connect content to popular trends and categories, and are linked to digital marketing strategies to increase brand visibility and stimulate audience interaction-as we saw clearly in the groups analyzed46.
Phrases with direct calls for digital engagement, such as “share this with someone who needs it,” “save this post,” and “comment,” are also used by all profiles. Network tagging, references to commemorative dates in the struggle against gender-based violence, collaborations, and formats favored by the algorithm (carousels and short videos that generate dwell time and are saved/shared) are also constant strategies used by the groups to amplify reach.
From this basic level of actions, present in all profiles, we identified specific strategies that reveal greater mastery of the expertise of generating engagement, such as network tagging, “collabs,” and reposting/commenting on videos and other viral content (Chart 3).
The groups’ visual language also acts as activist language and as a mechanism for defining identity and profile recognition aimed at engagement47. Among the groups analyzed, most displayed a standardized aesthetic, forging a visual identity of rapid recognition. Their color palette also enables a form of communication of belonging, based on purple, traditionally associated with feminist struggle.
We identified three models of a certain visual ethos in the groups analyzed. The first reflects a formal profile of institutional credibility, especially among groups more closely linked to the formal legal apparatus (@IMP and @justiceiras). The second carries a connective-emotional visual appeal and a recognizable investment of resources in a more sophisticated aesthetic elaboration (@mapadoacolhimento and @levantefeminista). Here, there is an appeal to symbols of delicacy (flowers, embroidery, nature elements), vulnerability (bloodstained flowers, tears), and struggle (drawings and images of groups of women marching with raised fists). Finally, there is a “spontaneous” aesthetic (@maselenuncamebateu), with unedited images and testimonies made on cell phones, with warning icons and “alert signs,” showing, with few technical resources, the urgency of the denunciations.
Corporalities as signs of struggle and belonging
Corporalities also stand out as a discursive-visual element in the groups’ repertoire. The profile @levantefeminista constructs a combative and insurgent aesthetic, marked by images of a collective body of women marching, bodies that scream, raise fists, carry banners and signs. As in other manifestations of the feminist movement42, the bodies of femicide victims are made present through the many pairs of shoes on the ground, as in the campaign “Who killed?” The diversity of bodies portrayed-Black, Indigenous, trans, fat women, with expressions of anger, pain, solidarity, or exhaustion-breaks with the idealization of the woman-victim or woman-hero. They are real, politicized, insurgent bodies that produce truth and connection with those who see them.
@mapadoacolhimento also shows diverse bodies in drawings of Black, White, and Indigenous women and uses references to a corporality oriented toward listening and support, the group’s central ethos, with images of joined hands, affectionate gazes, and outstretched arms.
The groups also resort to the bodies of their own activists as presence and narrative. In the profile @IMP, the most striking image is the body of its founder herself. With an upright and serene posture, delicate gestures, and articulate speech, the body of this activist is a witness and icon of the Brazilian struggle for the defense of the rights of women who, like her, have had their lives and trajectories irreversibly affected. Maria da Penha lends her symbolic body of resilience and resistance to this struggle. In @atamojuntas, the bodily sign is likewise made present in the corporeal representation of its founder. A present body of a fat woman, the firm body of an obá of Candomblé, hair of a Black woman whose marks of ancestry and religious belonging are shown in videos. The @justiceiras brings images of the various specialists-lawyers, psychologists, and activists-explaining legal and mental health topics. Thus, they explore emotional corporality less and the institutional body more, as support and reference.
As seen in the profiles analyzed, the body-a terrain of intense discursive-ideological, moral, and political struggles-is a political sign that affirms the presence of diverse modes of existence, constituting the physical and symbolic representation of marginalized identities. For digital activism, bodies as image-signs also constitute political-media interfaces that signal resistance to violence and rights violations, demand recognition of rights, and perform embodied and collective forms of resistance48,49.
Vulnerabilities as connective and political force
The dissemination of statistics on femicides and so many other nonlethal forms of violence posted by the groups reveals an almost ontological vulnerability of existing as a woman. Another common element among the groups was the use of case reports and personal testimonies that personify experiences of violence.
@mapadoacolhimento further emphasizes vulnerabilities instituted by patriarchal education, which appear in denunciations of harassment suffered (“since we are little, we are taught that we must behave, that we must respect ourselves, we learn that ‘men are just like that’ and we learn to ‘let it go’”). In a similar way, the profile @atamojuntas speaks of this vulnerability instituted by gender mandates, in testimonies of women who suffered aggression, threats, and harassment, whose everyday frequency is synthesized in the catchphrase “we don’t have a single day of peace!” and in the “trigger warnings” invoked in many posts.
@IMP posts also reinforce women’s vulnerability in the face of violence by their partners, even among those who enjoy certain social privileges, such as the case portrayed of an actress, White, famous, and wealthy, which shows that such attributes did not spare her from humiliating and degrading situations and aggression.
Through real-life reports, short and impactful phrases, the profile @maselenuncamebateu creates affective ties with its followers, who often recognize themselves in the stories shared. Comments such as “It feels like they wrote about me” or “Now I understand what I have gone through” reveal how the language used activates painful memories and promotes recognition and validation of experience. The hopeful intent is that that the process of self-knowledge will lead to the struggle for one’s rights.
@levantefeminista relies on an approach in which women’s pain is exposed with political radicality. The stories of femicide victims are presented not as individual tragedies, but as symptoms of a violent system that must be dismantled. In this way, suffering is recognized and presented as an expression of lived injustice and a force for collective coordination. The profile calls on followers to share, comment, tag other people, and amplify the network of visibility of the denounced cases. Emotional engagement is reinforced by captions that formulate direct questions, for example: “Who cries for these women?” or “How many more will need to die for us to be heard?”
The vulnerabilities of activists were also portrayed by the groups @atamojuntas and @IMP. In one testimony, activist Maria da Penha recalls the violence perpetrated by her ex-husband 40 years ago and shows that it remains updated in the death threats and insults she receives from certain internet users. The activist from @atamojuntas also reports aggressions suffered at the hands of members of far-right politics.
We perceive that this set of testimonies serves a reversal of meanings, also expected in activist communication: testimonies of suffering provide support for struggle, converting feelings of fragility and injustice into force and civic action16,17,29,38,42,50.
Final considerations
The groups analyzed represent only a small part of a complex and multifaceted digital ecosystem in which the struggle against gender-based violence is waged on multiple fronts. Despite thematic and strategic specificities-ranging from emotional support and care offered by @mapadoacolhimento to the legal mobilization of @justiceiras and @IMP, from the problematization of psychological violence in @maselenuncamebateu to the intersectional denunciation of femicide by @levantefeminista and @atamojuntas-the profiles build a convergent activist grammar. This grammar is sustained by discursive forces that denounce, inform, support, and demarcate memory, coordinating emotional sensitization to practical political action16,29,41,42,50.
The action of the groups studied in confronting gender-based violence, and especially femicide, demonstrates their capacity to foster local and connected solidarity networks. They emerge as examples of this new social morphology, as Manuel Castells51 argues, one sustained by digital technologies that enable immediate interaction among people from different regions and countries, the formation of communities, care and support networks, the rapid dissemination of information, and the construction of resilient networks, all fundamental for coordinating protests, mobilizations, and the sharing of advocacy and political pressure strategies42,45,47,52.
The feminist-interface digital activism and women’s rights advocacy studied here operates a powerful conversion of vulnerabilities forged by intersecting patriarchal structures16,37,38 into collective resistance. Through strategies aimed at algorithmic engagement, multimodal imagetic language, and the representation of plural and politicized corporalities, the groups transform intimate suffering into public denunciation, validating experiences, building belonging, and, above all, producing knowledge and mobilizing action. Thus, the profiles transcend their informative function and become spaces for rebuilding subjectivities, political coordination, and resistance, showing the contribution of digital activism to the construction of effective gender justice and to the preservation of memory as a continuous political act. Thus, they extend political space into the everyday online media sphere, shaping discursive fields of action53 modulated by emotions, personal stories, and a sense of belonging, exceeding traditional actions in the relationship between the State and social movements.
On the other hand, the ephemeral nature of online attention, which proves difficult to sustain over the long term54, challenges groups to develop digital engagement strategies that are effective, ethically oriented toward a perspective of care, and at the same time capable of dealing with scarce resources and algorithmic interference18-20,33. There is a need to problematize the games of visibility inherent to platforms. The agenda of confronting violence may be captured by a logic of spectacularizing pain and professional self-promotion, in which activism is converted into personal marketing, displacing the meaning of collective struggle toward the construction of biographical brands in the attention market15,21,42,54.
Finally, we believe that a closer approximation between groups dedicated to activism against gender-based violence and Collective Health would bring mutual benefits, qualifying the information and action of their agents, communicating more effectively, and, above all, expanding the spheres of penetration of public policies aimed at the right to live a life free from violence.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the CNPQ for the funding (Process 405843/2023-2); Dr. Jefferson Lima for his support in data collection (Health Information Laboratory/ICICT-Fiocruz); and Dr. Amparo Lasen (Complutense University of Madrid) for her reading and critique.
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